Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

For Sadowski, it felt as if this night would never end. It was the night before the Fourth of July and it felt a hell of a lot like Christmas Eve, back when he was a kid. He remembered not being able to get to sleep or even stay in bed, and one year, when he was about five, he’d crept into the family room early, started unwrapping his presents, and gotten a good walloping for it when he was caught. But he was all grown-up now, and he had no excuse.

He couldn’t even talk about any of this to Ginger. It was all top secret. Not that she’d have understood it anyway. All she could talk about lately was going to Las Vegas to catch that faggot, Elton John, at some casino. “It’s for my act,” she kept saying, and Sadowski kept promising he’d take her some other time, though the point of taking a stripper to Las Vegas, on your own dime, eluded him. There were more strippers and more hookers per square inch in Las Vegas than anywhere on the whole fucking planet. Why bring your own? It’d be like carrying a six-pack into a bar.

“Stan, aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she asked now, from under the covers. “You’re keeping me up.”

There were only two rooms in the apartment and there wasn’t a real door between them — just a couple of louvered panels that swung back and forth. Sadowski had the TV on — another one of those Cold Case files — and he was swigging his fifth or sixth beer of the night. “I’m not sleepy,” he shot back, and she instantly retorted, “Then why don’t you go back to your place, because I am.”

She had a point — though he would never have admitted it. He’d only come over here to get his rocks off — and he’d already done that — and there was only one reason not to go back to his own place now.

All his gear was there and he knew, if he did, he would start fiddling with it again.

He watched TV until the show ended — it was another one of those where the DNA from a semen stain caught up with the guy ten years later — and then, when he was satisfied that he’d made his point and kept her awake long enough, he tossed the can into the garbage pail, burped loudly enough to elicit a disgusted groan from the bedroom, and headed out.

The night air felt good — it was relatively cool, maybe high sixties, but it was still dry. The only thing that could have spoiled their plans was rain, and there was absolutely no fucking chance of that. During the commercials on Cold Case, he’d kept flipping back to the Weather Channel, just to hear more about the arid conditions in the L.A. Basin and the advisories for anyone planning some Fourth of July festivities: “The whole county is a tinderbox,” one blow-dried blonde declared, “so don’t even think about setting off those Roman candles or cherry bombs, folks.”

Well, it wasn’t any goddamn cherry bomb he was planning to set off.

Driving home in his black Explorer, he was careful not to go too fast or make any mistakes that some cop on patrol might pull him over for. Even a guy his size would never pass the Breathalyzer test with a six-pack under his belt. (Once, he’d been pulled over and failed the test after having only three.) No, easy does it, he kept telling himself. Easy does it.

His own place was a dingy apartment above a mechanic’s shop, accessible by a wooden staircase off the alley. Ginger had never been there; nobody had ever been there. And that was just the way he liked it. He’d replaced the landlord’s door, at his own expense, with one made of vulcanized steel, with a kick-proof base panel and a dead bolt that could withstand anything short of a battering ram. Inside, he had a warren of small, dark rooms, the last of which had its own locked door on it. He took his key ring out of his pocket, opened it, and flicked the switch on what he called his War Room.

A bank of ceiling lights came on, bathing the room in a stark, white glow. On the walls he’d mounted topographical maps of L.A., along with some free gun posters he’d gotten from Burt at the firing range. In the center of the room, there was a beaten-up desk and chair, and behind that a couple of green metal lockers he’d salvaged from a gym being demolished up the street. That was where he kept his field gear.

Should he just suit up, he thought, and get it over with? He knew this would happen — that if he got anywhere near his stuff again, he would want to get started.

But he also knew what Burt had told them all, a dozen times: “If it goes off too soon, it’ll go nowhere.” The whole idea was to carefully plant the incendiary devices in all the places marked on the map, and time them to go off so the resulting blaze would be unstoppable. As soon as the fire department moved its resources to stop one, another one would start up, just beyond where a firebreak might have been formed. Burt knew all about this stuff — he’d been a volunteer firefighter in the Northwest, and he’d made a thorough study of the L.A. geography and terrain. If everybody in the inner circle did exactly as he was supposed to do, then the whole west side of Los Angeles, from Westwood to the Pacific Palisades, would go up in the biggest fucking conflagration the country had ever seen. And the Sons of Liberty would have done in one night what the Minutemen hadn’t been able to do in years: put the illegal aliens — and the terrorist threat from our unguarded borders to the south — in the dead center of the national radar screen.

Burt had all the rest figured out, too — how it’d look like some wetbacks or foreign agents had done it (this was part of the plan that Burt had kind of kept under wraps), and the war to reclaim America’s borders, and its proud white heritage, would be well under way.

Sadowski couldn’t resist popping open the lockers and looking over his equipment one more time. Army fatigues (he considered this work to be a continuing part of his national service), flashlight, canteen (filled with Gatorade to keep his electrolytes high), a forty-caliber Browning Hi-Power pistol (its grip made from the wood of the last surviving Liberty Tree), and most important of all, his fireproof asbestos sheath; this was what the smoke jumpers up north used, just in case they found themselves caught in the middle of a fire. Burt had shown them what to do. As fast as you could, you made a depression in the ground, then lay down in it with the sheath zipped up (from the inside) from your feet to your head. If the fire lingered, you’d probably cook to death—“like an ear of corn in aluminum foil,” Burt had joked — but if you were lucky and it swept on past quickly enough, you’d make it out alive.

In a rucksack, under a wadded-up mosquito net, there were a half dozen incendiary bombs on timers, all of them housed in empty Kleenex boxes — the boutique style. It was amazing how cheaply Burt had been able to make them; all he’d needed was some battery-operated alarm clocks, a bag or two of fertilizer, some of those Fire Starter sticks for home barbecues. Sadowski wondered why there weren’t more arsonists; you could create some major havoc for not much money, and with very little chance of ever getting caught. Most of the evidence against you went up in the blaze. (Burt had bragged that he’d been arrested several times, but never convicted, for fire-related crimes.)

There was a portable TV in the corner, perched on top of a mini fridge, and Sadowski turned it on. Cold Case had been replaced by another of his favorite shows, American Justice. The host, Bill Kurtis, was someone Sadowski thought he could really get along with; he seemed like a regular guy. Sadowski took a cold beer out of the fridge and plopped himself down on the rickety desk chair. It was a rerun — about some woman in Texas who’d run over her cheating husband in a parking lot — but it was still good. And it took his mind off what he had to do — at precisely 1700 the next afternoon — in the swanky hills of Bel-Air.

And wasn’t his old army buddy — Captain Derek Greer — going to get a good swift kick in the ass out of that? Sadowski hoped — though it wasn’t likely on the Fourth of July — that he’d get to see him up there, at the Arab’s place. It would be so much sweeter if Greer actually knew who had fucked him.